Category: Fruit

How to Buy Vegetables and Fruit, 1866. Miss Corson provides pages of details on buying meat (with graphics), and two dainty paragraphs on fruits and vegetables. This entry speaks to me as I follow the recent outcry on food waste in the US. I am particularly guilty of buying fruits and vegetables and not eating…

This Is NOT Salad. Not that I'm complaining, but this definitely does not qualify for salad. This recipe obviously pre-dates the temperance movement. Totally meets the 5 ingredients or less threshold for ease and simplicity. Ingredients: 6 Oranges 1/4 cup white sugar 1/4 pint or 1 teacup of brandy, rum, or Madeira More Fun Discoveries…

December Menu - Welcome December! This bill of fare for 8 people includes giblet soup, broiled eels and potatoes, veal, turkey liver, and glazed apples. A hearty winter meal. This menu and recipe set comes from the Franco-American Cookery Book (1844). The book is unique because it is organized around menus for each day of…

The Search for Persimmons - Persimmons are truly a seasonal and regional fruit. The local farmers' market has been flush with persimmons for the past few weeks and I've been looking for persimmon recipes with little luck. Then, a happy coincidence. The Library of Congress had a special blog post on early American beer brewing…

This is a simple pseudo apple pie recipe, if there is such a thing. Only the border of the dish has crust, which means you're not rolling out dough and trying to gently place it in the pan - or you could use this recipe to finish off that little bit of pie crust that…

Who doesn't love apples, brown sugar, and cream?!? Makes a very nice dessert. This is an easy recipe for baked apples: Slice them up Sprinkle with 1 cup of brown sugar & 1 cup of water Bake Cool and dust with powdered sugar Serve with cream The apples would be very tender if cut into…

Direct from 'Experience's School'. Classic! This entirely sums up my 20s. Sincere is something else. She managed to describe how to freshen up stale butter to sell at the market, how to make apple butter, and how to put together a funeral wreath (using a variety of local plants) all in 1 newspaper column. Whew!…

We once lived in a house with a scraggly peach tree in the backyard. Each year, I would pick the peaches when they were still not quite ripe in order to save them from the birds. We used them for peach jam. This recipe for under ripe fried peaches would have been delicious! Hopefully a…

This recipe is interesting because it also offers insight into the daily lives of our cooks. They cut the fruit up in the morning and leave it in the sunshine all day. Then when the baking is done, they move the fruit into the oven. I recall hearing once that 6-7 hours/day was spent cooking…

With a plentiful sprinkling of fine white sugar...use it at the beginning of breakfast; it is exceedingly refreshing and wholesome! Grapefruit - a treat for all ages! More Fun Discoveries Keeping Drains Clear ~1886 Currie Powder ~1866 Eating an Artichoke ~1886 Source: Miss Corson's Practical American Cookery and Household Management, 1886.

Oranges filled with jelly sound delicious! And "The effect is very pretty." Note the reference to Florida orange jelly. If you do a quick internet search, you come up with oranges filled with jello, but I don't think it's necessarily what they were going for. That said, I'm sure the modern twist is probably easier!…

What, you are probably asking yourself, is a whortleberry? Well, I'm glad you did asked. Other names include: bilberry and lingonberry. The name huckleberry is derived from whortleberry (Huckle/Whortle - I suppose I see the similarity). Whortleberries are often confused with blueberries. Blueberries were cultivated from hybrids only about 100 years ago, which I did…

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